


Baby Sollux is Not a Fruit: A Salad of Scenes Among Dragons

by RainofLittleFishes



Series: The Town Dump: A Social Occasion for Crossovers & Fusions [3]
Category: Homestuck, Temeraire - Naomi Novik
Genre: Alternate Universe - Temeraire Fusion, argh just wanted fluff and now world building is putting it on hold, dragonstuck, needs more dragons, trolls as dragons
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-18
Updated: 2015-09-18
Packaged: 2018-04-21 00:56:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4808789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainofLittleFishes/pseuds/RainofLittleFishes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Homestuck Characters in Temeraire Land. (Okay, in a current North America anyhow, which is only sort of the same thing.)</p><p>*</p><p>By the time they hatch, after weeks to months of incubation in the steam room, all of the dragonets have had a chance to listen to the aerie children doing their homework for almost as long. </p><p>Officially, this is done to equip the dragonets with an early education. Unofficially (which means everyone knows, it’s the aerie after all) the policy gives the dragonets an introduction to all the more convenient candidates and a decent idea of what they’re like. </p><p>Reading your homework out loud for months gave you a semi-permanent hoarse throat and a fondness bordering on obsession for lemon-honey "tea". </p><p>It also gave you Sollux.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Baby Sollux is Not a Fruit: A Salad of Scenes Among Dragons

By the time they hatch, after weeks to months of incubation in the steam room, all of the dragonets have had a chance to listen to the aerie children doing their homework for almost as long.

Officially, this is done to equip the dragonets with an early education. Unofficially (which means everyone knows, it’s the aerie after all) the policy gives the dragonets an introduction to all the more convenient candidates and a decent idea of what they’re like.

Sollux chose you straight out of the shell because you had the most interesting math and science reading, and it’s certainly not the first such… academically minded partnership. Historically, however, Sollux _was_ the first to insult Pythagoras, Tycho Brahe, Isaac Newton, and Nikola Tesla before demanding to be fed and inquiring after the nature of apples and if they were related to that most-holy-of-elixirs-according-to-Dave.

*

You’ve never regretted being born to the Aerial Corp. Where you’re born isn’t the kind of thing that you get to pick any more than when, or to whom, but you just love your life! You love your mess of obnoxious overly intelligent half-sibs, your mom and Testifica, your sweep of service with the couriers as a message runner for Nimbatus and Captain Harley (not a half-brother, but sort of a half-uncle? Whatever, Jake’s cool.).

And you love, love, love, your _baby_. Sollux.

Sollux is not _quite possibly_ the cutest dragon to every peek out of a pipping shell, he simply _is_ the cutest. Okay, so officially you registered him as Apricitas, because almost all the dragons in the English-speaking aeries have Latin names and the theme around here is mostly light and justice and truthiness, but you were _totally_ going to call him Apricot, you just got side-tracked by his _tiny shiny hiney_ and its _tiny shiny scales_ and meanwhile while you were feeding his little face and just feeling _your_ face crack from sheer _glee_ , Jake was giving him a Latin lesson and Sollux decided that he might have to rise and shine and be all sorts of sunny but he wasn’t going to be a hairy fruit. Boo. It would have been so cute.

So Nimbatus laid Sollux’s egg (and wasn’t that a surprise – Jake thought she was a he and Nimby didn’t see what the big deal was) but she still hasn’t ‘fessed up to who the daddy is. Which isn’t all that rare, dragons are forthright on mating fondness but not all that jealous about it, not like they are about their captains. They don’t really _get_ marriage, or why anyone wouldn’t think being born in an aerie is simply the best, like only one step down from the naturally best thing, which is, of course, being a dragon. Like, _technically_ , most of you human-types are bastards, but it’s not like it _means_ anything here. It’s the twenty-first century, humans have mostly moved on to getting weird about other things, even if they are equally silly things to get worked up about.

What _is_ downright mind-bogglingly strange is that Sollux has four wings. Count ‘em. Four adorable tiny wings.  (EeeeeEEEeeeeeEEeee!) Functional wings. He’s still only cat-sized, but you hold him up every day (and you will as long as you can) and he flaps until he tires and you tell him just how strong he is, and how fast he’s going to be, and how you are _so happy_ that he picked you because you just love chatting math with someone who wants to do more than, say, calculate tips. (Looking at you Dave-babe, you and your sad little @pplephone3.)

You’ve since moved on to physics, history, current events, and computers, and Sollux is great company there too! You can never have too many computers! You’ve got your glasses (official aviator screen shades, but not half so silly as Dave or Dirk’s!), and your tablet, and your two phones (a Penguin11 and an @pple8.3), and your three laptops, one since taken over by Sollux. On the internet, no one knows he’s a dragon. An itty bitty adorkable cat-sized dragon.

Since Nimbatus is a courier dragon, and Sollux is still so tiny, it’s likely that he’s going to be courier-sized too, possibly even smaller than his dam. Nimby can carry about 600 lbs altogether, a bit more if she’s not going as far, and she’s a lot faster with just Jake. (Just-Jake speed = ‘bat outta hell.) Couriers have mostly been replaced by technology in war zones, and Jake and Nimby do a ton of search and rescue when they’re not taking on aerie apprentices… and sometimes when they are. (Woo!) For the less adrenaline-addicted (well, among the captains at least, almost all the dragons have a bit of competitiveness in them), there are still actual deliveries to make. The age of internet has relieved courier dragons of a lot, but within a couple hundred mile radius, dragon still pwns FedEx, and Amazon contracts as many of the private couriers as they can.

There’s actually a contract guide floating on the internal server to alert teams electing to leave after their mandatory service as to what the industry standards of pay and benefits are and what levels to hold out for if the initial offering is stingy. Being an _unofficial_ document, it’s been revised and annotated by a variety of captains (and dragons) so many times the pdf is now a sort of black on white ribbon running through a gauntlet of multi-colored interjections on both sides. You love the Pennsylvanian Aerie. No one here stands much on formality or hierarchy.

Sollux is currently snoozing on you as you read your school assignment, with your feet propped up on Bec, and you can’t help but pet Sol’s tiny cute little horns, all four of them, and stare down his tiny throat when he has his little mouth open, tongue dangling. When he snores he sounds like a cat purring and it is the absolute best. The best. You are just out of superlatives, and drowning in warm fuzzy happiness for, like, the past month. You smuggle him into your room and he sleeps on your bed but prefers your boobs. Yesterday your brother tried to be all kinds of helpful (which amounts to not very) and pick a chunk of dog hair off your shirt and when he got in your space Sollux hissed at him from the depths of your cleavage like a very savage teakettle.

You’re kind of offended that your brother could notice a bit of lint but didn’t notice that the giant hump under your shirt was a dragon. _Spot check fail, John._

Sollux rolls over and you play with his wings as he blinks at you sleepily, stretch, flex, rub the skin along the vanes and panes and the little gathers where they connect to his back. He smells like baby dragon, not quite lizard or bird or larval human or the meat and fish he’s been eating, just, like _potential_.

He’s a picky little thing, prickly about people and dragons and even Bec. He’ll ignore food to argue in the cutest little nasally voice, over everything from historical scientists to current policy to organic farming, and he’ll _hmph!_ with great assertiveness _even when_ _you don’t think he knows what he’s talking about_. He hisses his “s”s and he picks the fruit out of his dinner and eats it first and he wouldn’t let you oil his skin until you tried every scented oil you could think of, olive oil, oranges, tea, stealing some of your mother’s rarely used perfume and then a grabbag of handcreams. Sollux currently smells like baby dragon plus lemons and sage, sort of refreshing and also a little like sausage.

You’ve had the past three weeks since Sollux hatched mostly free. You still attend a few lectures and you keep up with your homework, but you’re supposed to be “assertively bonding”, though Kankri assures you that “there’s no need to make it an issue of dominance” and that snuggling and chatting time is quite sufficient. You’ve taken that to mean sleepovers every night have the aerie’s approval. You plunk a kiss on Sollux’s nose and he sneezes and crawls two steps higher up your chest and plunks back down.

Dragons in the human-side of the aerie are frowned on, like they’re worried that the dragons will get jealous when they outgrow the doors and the floor weight ratings. _Pffft_. If Sollux outgrows your room you’ll just move in with him.

The day has been warmer than the past few weeks and you’ve been trying to convince Sollux to sleep next to you instead of on top of you, installed precisely between your boobs. This has been so far unsuccessful, not least of which _because you just want to snuggle him forever_ , and as fast as you remove him, he kitten-claws his way back up your shirt. He’s currently in the valley between your girls, round little tummy draped over your own rounded tummy. You are so sweaty. And he still smells that tiny bit like sausage. No one wants to be sweaty _and_ smell like sausage.

“Sollux, what’s the deal with my boobs? Like, you’re not even a member of Class Mammalia, I _know_ you can’t be obsessed for the same reasons as the last boy that tried to get a handful.”

He bares his teeth at you and snaps once, and you’ve “aggressively bonded” enough to know that that was provoked by the mention of Disrespectful Lech and not you.

“Two,” he very clearly enunciates, and he aggressively snuggles his chin into you while aggressively staring you in the eyes. It’s one part effective because it’s obvious he doesn’t intend to move without serious complaint, but it’s just that tiniest part ineffective because _he is literally so cute you want to hug him all day_.

You had noticed that he tends to do things symmetrically, like if he crawls up your leg he shifts to your front or back and then goes straight up the middle, and when he only has a little way to go he adjusts his grips to end in a position that is perfectly bilaterally symmetrical. If he does two or four or sixteen or thirty two reps with one set of wings, he’ll do the same with the other.

You haven’t said anything to any of the adults because he’s just a baby and you don’t want to get him labeled OCD or something when it doesn’t seem to be hurting anything. Then again, most dragons obsess about at least one thing. Every captained dragon you’ve met holds their captain above all others, including the law, and most have a sort of draconic avarice for shiny things. Redglare collects swords, which look like toothpicks in her grip. Darkleer, an ironwing whose captain defected to the US during the cold war, collects so much scrap metal that he nests on it like a fairytale hoard. Kankri collects signed first edition books. And hate mail. (Or maybe he collects people with whom he enjoys a good argument and those are just the souvenirs.)

Sollux appears to have collected your back-up back-up laptop, which he’s since disassembled, _attempted_ to reassemble, and then moved on to your back-up laptop and jealously guarding the screen whenever someone other than you tries to look. He’s been giving covetous looks at your tablet too, and you’re not sure how long you’ll have sufficient computers if he’s fixated on them for his hoard. Tablet screens were not designed to be tapped on by dragon claws, even itty bitty ones. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to NPR for the phrase "tiny shiny hiney".
> 
> To anyone who made it down this far:  
> I have a few scenes/scenarios/characters to go and may just leave this open for later inspiration.  
> You however, are welcome to provide suggestions!  
> A few... guidelines so that they might best mesh with a likelihood to fit with what I've got started.  
> If a character is human in Homestuck, they are human here.  
> If a character is a troll, they are now a dragon. (Except Eridan. He is now a captain. Crew: 0. Dragon Feferi. Mission: protect Feferi's honor from all these dragons of loose morals.)  
> If they are are neither, I haven't gotten to them yet, go wild. Except Hal. He is probably a dragon. And Bec. He is a dog in goggles.


End file.
